Thursday, July 26, 2012

Go Write a Blog About It

Blogging is hard.

I know that sounds like the complaint of a whiny teenager,
but I feel stupid writing here again after a six month hiatus without
acknowledging this.

My book club just read “A Visit From the Goon Squad”. I devoured
this one over the course of a week on Lake Michigan, and it rocked me. It
restored my interest in fiction. And I knew I would love it early on, somewhere
around Chapter Two, when Bennie was introduced and immediately characterized by
his ruminations about shameful moments in his past. I do this. I have a mental reel
of stories I turn on sometimes, titled “WHY WOULD I SAY THAT OUT LOUD?!”. The
trailer would show scenes of me disclosing my sexual history to an entire
classroom of future colleagues and speaking candidly about my history of
depression to a shady news group that exploited my naiveté. All of these
vignettes go towards a truth about me that I love but resent at times: I am not
just an open book, I am a loud and reactive one as well.

So when I received some criticism about this blog, I shut
down. I worried that I had done it again—put my self, and my sense of it, too
far out there. I felt like the lesbian blogger equivalent of the Kardashians*,
deluding myself into thinking that my personal experiences were somehow helpful
to the masses. Despite all of the encouragement I’ve received from day one of
this project, all it took was one flippant comment to derail my belief that
this blog was a worthwhile exercise, and to create the fear that I was being
perceived as self-serving and histrionic.

And then Lindsey left town for two weeks, which means I
watched an excessive amount of Netflix documentaries. The topics ranged from
Dr. Tiller’s murder to a small protest movement in support of a gay teen forced
into inpatient reparative therapy, but the theme underlying each story was the
beauty of standing up for what is right, no matter the obstacles. Each time the
music swelled under the narrator’s motivational concluding message, I cried,
and thought “Good for them. The world is better because of what they did.”

I don’t think the world will be better because of this blog.
But, I will be better because of this blog. And if the issues I write about
here inspire one person to get involved, that’s enough to outweigh the possibility
that I sound like a politically-minded Kardashian.